Frank Kermode, who died on 17 August 2010 at the age of 90, was the author of many books, including Romantic Image (1957), The Sense of an Ending (1967) and Shakespeare’s Language (2000). He was the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. He inspired the founding of the London Review in 1979, and wrote more than 200 pieces for the paper.

Blasting the past has long been a habit of avant-garde artists and malcontent youth, but anti-passéisme has made small headway in the learned professions. They are keen on roots – for example, the roots of the modern in late 19th-century art, and its roots in romanticism; the cardinal assumption is that everything really starts earlier than you might think. Work proceeds at different rates in different disciplines, which rarely take much notice of each other; literary men long since decided that Modernism grew out of Symbolism and Symbolism out of Romanticism, and the art historians are now saying much the same thing.

When they do look over the fence, they tend to misunderstand or distort what they notice there, which adds to the already disgusting terminological confusion. For example, they have lit upon ‘dissociation of sensibility’, but given it senses wholly different from that attributed to it by its inventor, T.S. Eliot, though that was in turn wholly different from what Remy de Gourmont thought he meant by it. The Times obituary of Sonia Delaunay, who died on 5 December, says that she evolved with her husband a doctrine which Apollinaire, the great advertising copywriter of the New, labelled ‘Orphism’, which, says the obituarist, is ‘related to Futurism in its preoccupation with the artistic expression of such specifically 20th-century phenomena as speed and simultaneity of experience (very much what Eliot defined as dissociation of sensibility) …’ Apart from what I take to be the general daftness of this, one notes the total lack of connection between the two isms mentioned and ‘what Eliot defined’. Mr Wiedmann, whose ‘study in comparative aesthetics’ has a whole section on ‘dissociation of sensibility’, doesn’t as much as mention Eliot, merely saying that the phrase is ‘currently in vogue’. The Expressionists, he argues, had ‘a touching faith in primary vision’, and this required of them ‘the intermission of ordinary vision, the “dissociation of sensibility” …’ Here the term refers to the attempts of poets and painters to liberate the senses from ‘the tyranny of the object and its unrelenting chain of visual associations’, and the credit, called dubious by Wiedmann, goes to the Romantics, who pioneered ‘that prodigious derangement of all the senses on which Rimbaud was to embark with such passion …’ This is Gourmont’s revenge, for Eliot’s notion is here totally subverted.

Such unwillingness to let existing concepts hold still for long enough to mean anything is characteristic of all attempts to elevate stylistic descriptions into something grander, the Weltanschauung rather than the style. The period under discussion by Wiedmann and Goldwater abounded in isms trying to make this leap: leaving aside the better-known, such as Futurism, Vorticism, Symbolism, Expressionism, De Stijl, Constructivism etc, we have still to contend with Activismus, Suprematism, Synthetism, Zenitism, Centrifugism, Catastrophism, Neo-Plasticism etc. And provided all these are in reaction against Naturalism and Realism they all belong to the same Weltanschauung, which is captured first for one and then for another. Wyndham Lewis, who loathed Kandinsky, has to be an Expressionist after all. Lorca, Rilke, Breton, and even Whitman, sit down together as Symbolists or whatever.

Letters

SIR: What a novel thought of Frank Kermode’s: ‘Blasting the past has long been a habit of avant-garde artists and malcontent youth, but anti-passéisme [some kind of foreign food, I take it] has made small headway in the learned professions’ (LRB, 24 January). I’ve never met such an avant-garde artist: as far as I know, they might blast misplaced repetition or imitation of the past in the present, which is a very different sort of thing. I can’t speak for malcontent youth and am not even sure Frank Kermode necessarily thinks it mates with avant-garde artists. He doesn’t say so, probably because he knows avant-garde artists aren’t always still young (though ever youthful).

SIR: May I reply to Kermode’s misleading review of my Romantic Roots in Modern Art (LRB, 24 January). I am charged with subverting T.S. Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’. Since I use the phrase in a context so clearly defined as to avoid any confusion with Eliot’s meaning, whose name for this very reason was deliberately omitted, Kermode’s thunderous digressions seem quite disproportionate to the occasion. I am rebuked for criticising the metaphysical halo surrounding some modern art, on the grounds that paintings always come with some set of instructions. Even if that were the case, objecting to one set of labels as I do is surely not the same as denying the relevance of any. My Kantian disinterest does not preclude descriptions or instructions. Nor – and most important – does it denote a hatred of Expressionist art.

If Kermode sees fit to quote me, may I be quoted correctly and in context – the context being Kandinsky’s belief in the messianic function or non-objective art which announces the coming of the Holy Ghost. Kermode has my blessing to read into Kandinsky’s belief whatever he likes, a belief which is not strictly comparable to the creed professed by Yeats and Lawrence. Hence my statement that this form of Eastern Christianity ‘may sound strange to Western ears’. Changing the ‘may’ into a ‘will’, Kermode obviously alters the meaning.

Finally, and the most damaging charge of all: I am supposed to condemn every form of primitivism as ‘barbaric and evil’. What a terrible simplification of an argument which repeatedly differentiates between the primitivism in art and that of Nazism. Few readers – should I have any left after such distortions – will arrive at his conclusions.

Kermode is right about one thing: some of us foreign chaps do sound rather ‘heavy’, and not just because we labour in an alien tongue. Hence the occasional gracelessness. We actually do prefer ‘heaviness’ and ‘engagement’ to that modishly waspish, insular dryness which rules the British critical idiom today. However, in this case a heavy-handed touch seemed to me matched by – to coin a phrase – light-handed criticism.